The billion transistor mark has been crossed (CS5 anyone)

6 cores with multi-threading means 12 threads. Yikes.

http://www.tomshardwar​e.com …980x-gulftown,2573-2.html

So the billion transistor mark has been surpassed with no fanfare. Our desktops are turning into super computers of just a few years ago. Add in GPU's with dozens and now hundreds of stream cores and data munching is astonishing. Oh wait is it?

On youtube you can find a video of a 6Ghz system cooled by liquid nitrogen and booting windows. But alas its not really three times faster than todays 2Ghz machines.

But who cares, just keep turning out new hardware and eventually the software will catch up.

So with all this power we have and Primere Pro CS4 and CS5 using mercury engine to accelerate how is the performance?

I'm looking to upgrade my computer and 6 cores is not looking as important as stream cores. I want to do more video by time is a big problem. More CPU horse power speeds up most things, while more CPU power speeds up h.264 encoding and some effects.

Where is the balance? What did you build/buy recently in a computer and did you get what you expected.

I water cooled my computer a few months ago. It was a fun project and now its super quiet. I can over clock it like a mad man. I have two GTX 275s under water too. It was pretty expensive to do but I think it is worth it.


Do I EVER use this much power? no not at all. I dont even really game that much my GF does

sigma pi wrote in post #10217872
I water cooled my computer a few months ago. It was a fun project and now its super quiet. I can over clock it like a mad man. I have two GTX 275s under water too. It was pretty expensive to do but I think it is worth it.

So where would you recommend the balance of money spent. More towards the CPU or GPU. I mean two 275's aren't cheap.

I was thinking of a quad core with a $150 GPU, but a overclocked dual with more money towards GPU could be a better, at least for video editing (since blu-ray and avchd use h(x).264). This assumes GPU's mainly accelerate 264 encoding.

davidfig wrote in post #10217989
So where would you recommend the balance of money spent. More towards the CPU or GPU. I mean two 275's aren't cheap.

I was thinking of a quad core with a $150 GPU, but a overclocked dual with more money towards GPU could be a better, at least for video editing (since blu-ray and avchd use h(x).264). This assumes GPU's mainly accelerate 264 encoding.

The quadcore i have is older now Q6600
The programs i run dont manage it well. One core gets blasted and one is idleing lol

I wouldnt bother spending money on a 6 core CPU

I would dump money on ram and video card.

You can over clock the CPU easy on a 30$ cooler. So you dont have to go crazy and get a 3.X GHZ

I'm an I.T. systems guy and demand for CPU power is definitely not keeping up with supply in the vast majority of cases. In a typical office, most people honestly do not need more desktop computing power than they had 5 years ago. It won't increase productivity, it won't help anything. On the back end, our latest industry trend for servers is consolidation and virtualization. If I bought the latest "standard" 2CPU server, it would come in at half the price of just a few years ago and have 4x the CPU cores and 8x the RAM. We just can't use it for one application so we instead load up 20 apps and run them on 1 server (usually through virtualized OS or Apps) instead of 2 apps on each of 10 servers like the "old" days (of 2003).

It's crazy, but many PC servers are in fact turning into the supercomputers and mainframes of yesterday. I have a cluster of 6 computers, each with 128GB of RAM and 32Cores running a total of 100 virtualized Windows and LInux operating systems.

tkbslc wrote in post #10221511
I'm an I.T. systems guy and demand for CPU power is definitely not keeping up with supply in the vast majority of cases. In a typical office, most people honestly do not need more desktop computing power than they had 5 years ago. It won't increase productivity, it won't help anything. On the back end, our latest industry trend for servers is consolidation and virtualization. If I bought the latest "standard" 2CPU server, it would come in at half the price of just a few years ago and have 4x the CPU cores and 8x the RAM. We just can't use it for one application so we instead load up 2 apps and run them on 1 server (usually through virtualized OS or Apps) instead of 2 apps on each of 10 servers like the "old" days (of 2003).

It's crazy, but many PC servers are in fact turning into the supercomputers and mainframes of yesterday. I have a cluster of 6 computers, each with 128GB of RAM and 32Cores running a total of 100 virtualized Windows and LInux operating systems.

YOU ARE TELLING ME!!!!

my work station (Runs AS400 email & catalog)
it runs a Q9400 2.66GHz sooo much over kill

But the socket is sooo cheap now since the I7 has been out for a while now and the I3 I5 has been out for a little less.

and holy crap thats some computer you got there lol

i7 920 clocked to 3.6 ghz on air cooling.

Has 2 x Intel 80GB SSD's in a Raid mirror on WIn 7 64bit with 12gb ram.

Is it noticeably faster than my Q6600 system with Windows XP and 4gb of Ram?

A little, but I put that down to the SSD's.

Not twice as fast though.

Gel wrote in post #10231329
i7 920 clocked to 3.6 ghz on air cooling.

Has 2 x Intel 80GB SSD's in a Raid mirror on WIn 7 64bit with 12gb ram.

Is it noticeably faster than my Q6600 system with Windows XP and 4gb of Ram?

A little, but I put that down to the SSD's.

Not twice as fast though.

SWEET SET UP!!!

8GB ram for me on 7 64 bit

SSD would be nice just for my OS but out of my HDD price range but they are sooooo nice


Time to fire up crysis to bench mark lol jk

The trouble is that software designers are used to having ever increasing resources to draw upon. Producing sloppy, poorly written code that consumes twenty times the resources than it could, or should. Why? because its easier and probably cheaper than producing a neat and tightly structured piece of work that never fails.

sigma pi wrote in post #10221424
The quadcore i have is older now Q6600
The programs i run dont manage it well. One core gets blasted and one is idleing lol

I wouldnt bother spending money on a 6 core CPU

I would dump money on ram and video card.

You can over clock the CPU easy on a 30$ cooler. So you dont have to go crazy and get a 3.X GHZ

Sounds like a program problem, i know when im editing files in Lightroom I'm blasting all 4 cores at 100% a lot...and utilizing quite a bit of my 8gbs of ram

7D files are hell..I really need an i7 lol..

KenjiS wrote in post #10246372
Sounds like a program problem, i know when im editing files in Lightroom I'm blasting all 4 cores at 100% a lot...and utilizing quite a bit of my 8gbs of ram

7D files are hell..I really need an i7 lol..

You are right. And i think Lowner is one to something

yeah there is always a bottle neck somewhere and ram bottle necks are the worst for me.

w00t 7D

looks for software that exploits CUDA for processing.

Holy
Cow

with the piddly cheap GTX260, my processing time for re-encoding video with the 'right' software went from about 1:1.5 with my quad core, to about 1:.75 (1 hour took 90 minutes to re-encode with just the CPU, switch software to something that would use CUDA, was slightly quicker than realtime.)

I let Apple tell me what I need... I have a 27" iMac with the i7 and 512mb video card. Do I need more for photo and video editing?